Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts

Saturday, September 15, 2018

What To Do About Porn? (Part Deux)

In an earlier post, I had discussed (male-created) porn and its dark side, and what to do about it. One of the best things I had recommended was for Women to take over the industry, or at least jam the culture with feminist porn, as opposed to reflexively banning or censoring the often problematic stuff that is currently out there today.

Well, it seems that the city of Berlin, Germany is taking up this idea.  They plan to publicly fund and distribute feminist porn and make it freely available via public broadcasters.  Yes, really.  And their goal is to counteract all of the sexist (and often racist) mainstream porn that is currently readily available online to anyone with a pulse these days.  Young people will look at porn regardless, but at least with feminist porn, they will be learning useful things like consent, communication, and mutual pleasure, while hopefully unlearning all the toxic messages found in mainstream porn.

And I couldn't agree more.  Bring it on!

UPDATE:  Examples of existing feminist porn/erotica can be found here (NSFW).

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Finally, An Honest Article About the Decline of (Straight) Marriage in America

Recently, I posted an article on this blog about the real reason why heterosexual marriage is in decline in the USA.  (Spoiler alert:  both liberals and conservatives have it wrong--it is really because men are becoming increasingly redundant, and thus the original economic and socio-political purpose of marriage under patriarchy is becoming increasingly obsolete.)  Turns out, there is another article that is even more brutally honest than mine, titled "Marriage Is Declining Because Men Are Pigs", written by a man, no less.   This self-explanatorily titled article by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is highly scathing but nonetheless true.  To wit:

Basically, an awful lot of men are—and always have been—volatile and unreliable. They drink, they get abusive, and they do stupid stuff. They're bad with money, they don't help with the kids, and they don't help around the house. They demand subservience. They demand sex. And even on the one dimension they're supposedly good for—being breadwinners—they frequently tend to screw up and get fired.  In other words, marriage has been a bad deal for women pretty much forever. But they've been forced into it by cultural mores and economic imperatives, and that's the only reason it's been nearly universal in the past.  Nothing has changed much about that. It's still a bad deal for an awful lot of women, but cultural mores and economic imperatives have changed, and that means more women can afford to do what's right for themselves and stay unmarried these days.

I know what a lot of guys reading this will say as a stock response:  "Not ALL men!"  And technically, that is true, as there are still plenty of men getting married in 2016.  In fact, among college-educated men and Women, the marriage rates have barely budged since the 1950s.  But for those without a college degree, marriage rates have indeed dropped (and divorce rates rose) dramatically since then.  So what gives?  Here is what Kevin Drum has to say:

But there's one exception to this: the college educated. Well-educated men are fairly reliable; they have good earning power; they generally aren't abusive; and they've been willing—slowly but steadily—to change their habits and help out with kids and housework. For college-educated women, then, marriage is a relatively good deal. For everyone else, not so much.  And that's why marriage is declining among all groups except the college educated. For an awful lot of women, it's just a lousy deal. They're tired of putting up with all the crap they get from men, and so they're opting out. They'll opt back in when men start to pull their own weight. There's no telling when that's going to start happening.

And indeed, truer words have never been spoken.  Of course, this trend isn't entirely the fault of the bottom 80-90% of men who get chewed up and spit out by the oligarchy/plutocracy/kleptocracy/kyriarchy.  Much credit/blame also goes to the men at the top that hollowed out our economy, torpedoed our labor unions, and enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else who got thrown under the bus.  They are, after all, the ones who made college a virtual necessity to be able to earn a living wage (let alone what used to be called a "family wage") in this country these days, while simultaneously outsourcing, offshoring, and automating so many jobs that used to pay such decent wages.  But let's face it--that's karma, fellas.  We tyrannized and  "lorded it over" the better half of humanity (Women) for thousands of years and now we are finally getting our comeuppance.  We basically rigged the system in our favor and artificially propped ourselves up for millennia, and now the props are falling.  So it is no small wonder why so many Women are now choosing to "go it alone" in that regard these days.  Especially since Women are now becoming more educated than men on average, earning more college degrees overall.

And while it's true that increasing female empowerment has also undoubtedly contributed to the relative redundancy of males, as men are no longer being artificially propped up quite the way they once were, that is actually a GOOD thing that we should be celebrating.  Patriarchy is a fundamentally evil and thoroughly corrupt system, and the sooner it ends, the better.  And it is currently self-destructing as we speak, and has been for about half a century now.  As Stephanie Coontz (author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History) has noted, the patriarchal nuclear family model of the 1950s and earlier inherently required a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up and keep the "troops" (i.e. women and children) in line.  And when that violence and coercion is reduced or removed, the whole proverbial house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later.  So good riddance, let's never go back!

Marriage is, after all, a fundamentally patriarchal institution.  At least the monogamous, heterosexual variety that the conservatives just luuurrrrve to idealize, that is.  That's not to say that marriage can't be redefined and repurposed for a Matriarchal society--indeed it has been redefined and repurposed many, many times throughout history--but the outdated idea that everybody must get married and/or have children (or that doing so is the sine qua non of "real adulthood") needs to end yesterday.  Don't get me wrong, I am NOT anti-marriage.  But we as a society nonetheless need to become more tolerant of a wide variety of lifestyles and family types, and reject the obsolete ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and/or marriage.

And soon Women will be taking over, as they have already crossed the Rubicon in that regard.  Since the 1970s, Women have been going "two steps forward, and one step back", while men have been going "one step forward, and two steps back".  The song "Not Meant to Be" by Theory of a Deadman comes to mind.  Honestly, the inevitable death of patriarchy is really quite painless.  It's fighting to keep it alive that is causing so much pain for both Women and men.  And when Women finally do take over, they will remember exactly how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.   Don't say you weren't warned.

In the meantime, fellas, don't be a fool, stay in school.  And if you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em.  Not like that actually guarantees success anymore, but it sure can't hurt. Though for a lot of young guys today, perhaps as much as 80% of them, vocational/technical or trade school might actually be a better choice overall than college or university for those who are less academically inclined, with less debt too.  Failing that, I suppose you can always go join the circus, lol.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

The Real Reason Why (Straight) Marriage Is In Decline

For decades, many commentators and pundits (usually conservatives, but even some on the political left as well) have been bemoaning the supposed decline of the institution of marriage and rise of divorce and single motherhood.  The trend is often exaggerated, and in fact divorce rates actually peaked around 1980 and have been declining since after secularly rising for nearly a century, recently reaching a 40-year low.  But it is also true nonetheless that marriage rates have indeed been declining for about half a century while cohabitation rates have been rising dramatically during that time, and the percentage of babies born out of wedlock has increased as well.  Though the latter is basically old news, as most of the increase in the percentage of nonmarital births had already occurred before Dan Quayle got on his self-righteous soapbox about Murphy Brown in the early 1990s.

So why is this happening?  Conservatives nearly always blame feminism and/or the so-called sexual revolution, while progressives tend to blame the economy and economic inequality, but there is one huge factor that both sides tend to overlook.  We need to be brutally honest about this:  men are becoming increasingly redundant thanks to a combination of technology, globalization, outsourcing/offshoring, and oligarchy, and that trend had begun decades ago.  Our labor unions have been torpedoed, many good jobs have been outsourced or automated, and our once-great manufacturing base has been hollowed out and replaced by financialization.  The rich got richer and we all got poorer--and that was the result of MEN at the top, not Women.  Thanks a lot, Ronnie Raygun (zap)!  But honestly, that's karma, fellas.  So it is no small wonder why so many Women are now choosing to "go it alone" in that regard.  And while it's true that increasing female empowerment has also undoubtedly contributed to the relative redundancy of males, as men are no longer being artificially propped up quite the way they once were, that is actually a GOOD thing that we should be celebrating.  Patriarchy is a fundamentally evil and thoroughly corrupt system, and the sooner it ends, the better.  And it is currently self-destructing as we speak, and has been for about half a century now.  As Stephanie Coontz (author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History) has noted, the patriarchal nuclear family model of the 1950s and earlier inherently required a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up and keep the "troops" (i.e. women and children) in line.  And when that violence and coercion is reduced or removed, the whole proverbial house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later.  So good riddance, let's never go back!

Marriage is, after all, a fundamentally patriarchal institution.  At least the monogamous, heterosexual variety that the conservatives just luuurrrrve to idealize, that is.  That's not to say that marriage can't be redefined and repurposed for a Matriarchal society--indeed it has been redefined and repurposed many, many times throughout history--but the outdated idea that everybody must get married and/or have children (or that doing so is the sine qua non of "real adulthood") needs to end yesterday.  Don't get me wrong, I am NOT anti-marriage.  But we as a society nonetheless need to become more tolerant of a wide variety of lifestyles and family types, and reject the obsolete ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and/or marriage.

And soon Women will be taking over, as they have already crossed the Rubicon in that regard.  Since the 1970s, Women have been going "two steps forward, and one step back", while men have been going "one step forward, and two steps back".  The song "Not Meant to Be" by Theory of a Deadman comes to mind.  Honestly, the inevitable death of patriarchy is really quite painless.  It's fighting to keep it alive that is causing so much pain for both Women and men.  And when Women finally do take over, they will remember exactly how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.  So let's make the right choice.